I know the problems with dealing with foreign languages. I write console games a for a living and making sure the games work in eight different languages with the possibility of having to support Japanese (katakana and hirakana I think they're called) is a huge task.


Click the image above for the full screenshot of my dogfight competition entry so far (I'm working on the menus at the moment). All the text in that screenshot is drawn using bitmap fonts created from Truetype fonts. I am using Direct3D, so I draw the text as a series of quads. This is how every 3D game out there does it.

Here is a tool that will create a bitmap font for you from a Truetype font. It's the one I used for the fonts in that screenshot.
http://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/